Wordrunner eChapbooks it is a quarterly online literary publication of fiction, poetry or memoir, usually a collection featuring one author, plus the occasional anthology. They are trying to provide a launch for new works as well as encouragement to the authors, who are actually paid for their writing (albeit a token). They charge no fee for submissions. They can be reached at: www.echapbook.com/submissions.htm.

Two Peace Corps memoirs were submitted to Wordrunner in 2012. Both were under consideration, but according to editor and publisher, Jo-Anne Rosen, Rick Gray’s The Old Fever: A Memoir of Kenya was the more compelling of the two.

The Old Fever is really about Kenya’s spell — the fever of the place that got into the author’s blood and never left, making a return to everything that came before impossible. Let The Old Fever cast its spell over you at www.echapbook.com/memoir/gray, where hyperlinks to photos, videos and background articles have been added to enhance and deepen the reading. You may also download a pdf version to print and read at your leisure.

Rick Gray was a PCV in Kenya from 1988-90 and then traveled throughout Africa. Today he is teaching at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul, where he was recently named the Spring 2013 Research Fellow for his current book of poems in progress, Christmas in Iraq, set in military zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. His novel, Amongst Monks, was a finalist for the Bakeless Prize for Fiction. He received the Editor’s Award for poetry at MARGIE.